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And many years later, after the sands of time have forgotten the tract houses and such, there will be the granite rocks. With my writing on them. Telling the stories I wish to tell. Perhaps to be mutilated by a dictator trying to erase history. Maybe the etchings should be made quietly, so that they will not know to erase them. Calculate the number of characters you wish to enscribe, and talk to the people who do this for tombstones and see what kind of an effort it will take. Thus what kind of money we will be talking about. We will be wanting to uncover a face in the rock which will be substantial enough for the saga. And we will want to write it in Chinese and Arabic also. If we take a Mote in God's Eye approach, the purpose would not just be historical, but also to indicate the level of science and technology we have achieved. To explain in a terse manner about mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. One might ask, why try to encode so much info on such a thin medium as granite. The answer is in its obviousness and permanence. Glass is actually another tempting medium, in that it lasts very well in the wild. Shards of rounded glass tablets, although not the thing for tourists, would survive well. If you look at it, much of what we externally have of the epocs of history are their monuments. Granite is clearly one of the most durable forms. There is the idea of enclosing printed texts or microdots in glass. What one would have to do to truly preserve an idea. Make lots of copies, and have them difficult to eliminate them all. Would want to work will electronic forms of the documents. Should begin a scrapbook of possible drawings and writings. Quick outline of the major school subjects. Right now if you were to etch such a thing on a granite face, it would be a grafitti magnet. It would be covered with it in a manner of a month, no doubt. The glass or CD-Rom approach is probably better. But if what you want is a more permanent form of grafitti, then maybe granite is your thing. Go hire some grafitti artists. |